Yet the days between Mrs Thatcher's death and her funeral may prove to have been cathartic for the British people. As Tony Blair's ability to capitalise on Diana's death showed, a week of mourning can be a long time in politics. Mrs Thatcher's achievement, by common consent, is comparable only to Churchill's in wartime. But the decades since her fall have revealed a depressing British tendency to revert to the postwar attitude of acquiescence in decline. Only now has her true significance, her defiance of historical inevitability, fully dawned on us.

I include myself. Raised on the Left, I took time to adjust to a leader from the Right. Mrs Thatcher and my father admired one another — Nick Garland caricatured her as Mae West, beckoning him to "come up and see me some time" — and I was drawn to the bracing rigour of her intellectual supporters, not least at the Letwin salon. (See articles by Paul Johnson and Charles Moore inside.) But it was only after living with the reality of the Cold War in Berlin that I was ready to reconsider my allegiance. And only when the Falklands War forced me to take sides did I admit to myself that Mrs Thatcher represented freedom, and that she was right. 

That recognition changed my life. Academics loathed Thatcherism — my alma mater, Oxford, refused her an honorary degree — and I gravitated first to the think tank she had founded, and then to the Daily Telegraph and The Times. The battle of ideas still raged. At one of her press conferences in the 1987 election, I asked a question on education that provoked an outburst from Mrs Thatcher. Contradicting the Tory manifesto, she wanted to allow the proposed grant-maintained schools — precursors of today's academies and free schools — to charge fees, like the old direct grant schools. That was on "wobbly Thursday"; her frankness almost cost her the election. 

The fall of Communism was a glorious vindication of the Boadicea principle, but Mrs Thatcher feared the consequences of German reunification. A year after she resigned, I invited a few younger journalists to meet her for dinner at the Travellers' Club. When I mentioned among her accomplishments the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had brought freedom and unity to the German people, Mrs Thatcher saw red. It was as if one had reminded Boadicea that her late husband was an ally of the Romans. She thought a united Germany would inevitably dominate the Continent. Like Boadicea, Mrs Thatcher went down fighting against the idea of a European imperium. Who now will defend our freedom?